OANDA's Japan Head Steps Down as Asia Chief and Marketing Head Take Over

OANDA's Japanese brokerage has appointed two joint representative directors to succeed Yoshiharu Yanagisawa at the top of the Tokyo unit, according to a company notice issued on Tuesday. Akira Miyamura and Philip Waters now share the role at OANDA Securities, with the change taking effect on September 30. The English version of the notice lists both appointees as president.

Under Japan's Companies Act, the representative director is the board member authorized to act and sign on a company's behalf, a post that normally accompanies the chief executive's title.

Platform migration looms

The leadership handover comes roughly eight weeks before OANDA Securities retires MetaTrader 4 on November 27, completing a shift to MT5 that began in June, when the broker raised MT4 margin requirements to 10%.

The reshuffle follows a wider series of changes since Czech prop trading firm FTMO agreed in February 2025 to acquire OANDA from CVC Asia Fund IV. FTMO founders Otakar Šuffner and Marek Vašíček became co-CEOs of OANDA in March after Gavin Bambury stepped down, and in June the group promoted Lucian Lauerman, previously deputy chief operating officer, to chief executive of OANDA Europe.

Yanagisawa had served as managing director and representative director for Japan, and the unit's annual disclosures for the year to March 2026 named him as its representative. His pre-OANDA career spanned foreign exchange roles at Bankers Trust, HSBC and State Street, where he ran the Tokyo office for seven years and, according to his company biography, built relationships with Japanese retail FX aggregators.

Miyamura comes from the marketing side, having been chief marketing officer for Japan and Greater China since January 2020 and an executive officer at OANDA Japan since 2016 — a title that covers day-to-day management without carrying a board seat. Waters has been OANDA's regional CEO for Asia-Pacific and emerging markets since May 2022, based in Singapore, and only took on oversight of OANDA Securities in July. He joined the group in 2020 to run its emerging markets business and, after the FTMO takeover, folded OANDA Prop Trader into FTMO, a process that began when prop trading clients started moving across in March.